Emotion Across Speech and Faces: Shared Affective Mechanisms in Multimodal Foundation Models
Modern multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have made rapid progress on tasks requiring integrated perception across speech, vision, and language, including emotion recognition. However, it remains unclear whether they recognize speech and facial emotion through shared affective functional units or modality-specific pathways. We explore emotion-sensitive neurons (ESNs), sparse decoder neurons selectively associated with emotion categories, in three MFMs: Gemma-4-12B-it, MiniCPM-o-4.5, and Qwen2.5-Omni-7B. Using speech emotion recognition and facial expression recognition as complementary probes, we identify acoustic and visual ESNs. Visual ESNs are causally meaningful: deactivating them se...
| Authors | Xiutian Zhao, Luqi Sun, Björn Schuller et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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